Professional Development Philosophy & Plan

Professional Development Philosophy

As an educator, my job is to take a large share of the communities responsibility to raise our children. Furthermore, to be truly adequate, I believe it is necessary to take a personal stake in doing my absolute best to make sure each student receives the best education possible. This requires that I do whatever it takes to bridge the gap between knowledge and understanding through creativity and full use of all the tools at my disposal. Each piece of technology—electronic or otherwise—presents a chance for a student to grow and in my book it is unacceptable that I not give every option a try. The determining factor in whether I adopt a tool or not should be its positive results, not my personal misgivings. If students are learning, it is more than worth it and to that end, I can never stop and must never stop learning new ways to reach my students.

Professional Development Plan

As of this moment, I am moderately proficient with technology, but there is always room for improvement. For example, I have only recently created a twitter account and tweeted just once. However over the next year, I would like to get to the point that I am updating my students and their parents as much as possible; keeping the parents up to date on the class, possible discussion question or review for the whole family to go over in addition to delivering general messages to the class. Solid research into twitter and creative uses of it through the internet, book and magazine sources will help get me there along with keeping my eyes and ears open in order to gain experience using the site. This philosophy of improvement is one I want to have throughout my career; checking out workshops, publications and the experiences of those who “know” to keep me on the cutting edge.